Here in America, we sure do hate movie-makers and media types. When it comes time to explain why the entire country of 300,000,000 people hasn't uncritically adopted our own beliefs, they're the first group we're wont to blame. Case in point: "The Undefended City" by Bill Whittle, available via National Review Online. Whittle writes:
When I first got to college, back in the last few weeks of the Seventies, I finally got a chance to see an ordinary game of Dungeons and Dragons. My immediate inclination was to play as a Paladin: the pinnacle of Lawful Good, a character required to dash in and fight overwhelmingly powerful evil forces anywhere and at whatever odds.
These contests were short, depressing and hilarious, but all D&D really came down to in the end was slaying small monsters, taking their gold, buying slightly better gear and then slaying slightly larger monsters. Why not just save some time and become a Vorpal Sword distributor? Then you get the weapons and the gold, and people bring them both to you. And so a larval conservative was born. And I never played again.
That was the attitude I took into The Lord of the Rings when the first of the trilogy appeared in 2001, just a few months after the Two Towers actually did fall and the idea of good and evil suddenly became — to me and no doubt to you too — a great deal less ironic and a great deal more real.
What Whittle means is that he had no moral awareness prior to September 11th. Evidently, that event was his introduction to the concept of evil. Though he lived to watch the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iran-Contra affair, the rape of Phnom Penh, the Pinochet regime, the reign of Idi Amin, the Watergate scandal, the Los Angeles riots, the Suharto coup, the Rwandan genocide -- it wasn't until bin Laden knocked over the World Trade Center that Bill Whittle stopped thinking evil was "ironic."
But I digress.
This isn't about Mr. Whittle's little peccadilloes, it's about the media -- and the festering rot of cynicism, snobbery and moral infantilism that festers at the rotten heart of Los Angeles snobs.
I live a few miles from Santa Monica High School, in California. There, young men and women are taught that America is "a terrorist nation," "one of the worst regimes in history," that it’s twice-elected leader is "the son of the devil," and dictator of this "fascist" country. Further, "patriotism" is taught by dragging an American flag across the classroom floor, because the nation’s truest patriots, as we should know by now, are those who are most able to despise it.
Agitprop must always reach as low as it can for provocative examples, and then when it's reached bottom, try and reach a little lower. You'll notice that I included the Los Angeles riots and Suharto's coup in my list of examples of evil things, and you might have said "the gall! Comparing either of those to the Rwandan genocide! What gall! I can't believe the volume of gall-fluids this person must have up in his brainmeats that he thinks those things are even remotely comparable!"
And so is it with Whittle's example. I'm sure many of us would be uncomfortable at the mental image that summons to mind -- not because it's wrong to drag a flag across a floor, but because it's ridiculous for a grown man to be impressing high school students with mock-rebelliousness. You might ask how I know for sure that was what the teacher was doing, and I might shout at you that it's against the rules to ask questions.
No, obviously I don't know. Maybe it was part of an illustration of the power of polarization, in which case the teacher is so clever and self-possessed that even Bill Whittle's moaning hysterics fit perfectly into the lesson.
But I bet when Bill Whittle pictures this teacher, he pictures one of the sneering cosmopolitans routinely portrayed on King of the Hill. How many "liberal elites" has Bill Whittle actually met? God, who cares. He sees all the ones he needs to on TV. And in movies. And that's the truth because it confirms his desired images, which is okay because that's what those people are paid to do.
But when it doesn't confirm his desired images, there's hell to pay.
I sit with others in darkened rooms, watching films like Redacted, Stop-Loss, and In the Valley of Elah, and see our brave young soldiers depicted as murderers, rapists, broken psychotics or ignorant dupes –visions foisted upon me by bitter and isolated millionaires such as Brian de Palma and Paul Haggis and all the rest.
Because some soldiers are conscientious people who sacrifice for their country, it's a travesty when Hollywood depicts soldiers - or anything even remotely related to soldiers - in a negative light. That includes not only the idea that soldiers occasionally act in bad faith or against moral decency, but the idea that they're human beings who are fooled by lying-ass governments or their own misconceptions like the rest of us. In the Republican kitsch, troops occupy a place roughly between God and Pat Robertson in terms of embodying social morality and Republicans' sense of security and well-being. And that ought to make their depictions sacrosanct.
And as for the business of telling stories about human beings - fuck that. We don't want human beings, that's why we have soldiers. Besides, those elites shouldn't be talking about shit they don't understand, like wars or moral complexity.
He also rants about Oliver Stone, but in the interest of not killing ten people with Sudden Lethal Boredom Disorder, I won't quote it; we've all heard wingers rant about Oliver Stone. That's the point of Oliver Stone, now go away.
And standing against all this hypnotic power — the power of the mythmakers in Hollywood, the power of the information peddlers in the media, the corrosive power of America-hating professors on every campus in America... against all that we find an old warrior — a paladin if ever there was one — an old, beat-up warhorse standing up in defense of his city one last time. And beside him: a wonder. A common person... just a regular mom who goes to work, does a difficult job with intelligence and energy and grace and every-day competence and then puts it away to go home and have dinner with the family.
And why hasn't Hollywood made this movie yet? It's like The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen, except that the Enemy are the ones with hypnotic myth-power and the heroes are just a couple of people with the moral fortitude to stand up for banality and kitsch. Oh, I realize I'm talking like an elite now; only an elite would impugn something by calling it banal. Bill Whittle would call it common. Forget it.
But indulge my elitist, champagne-sipping, limousine-riding fancy for a moment (note: I'm broke); how can a governor of a state be a common person? She spends more money on campaigns than I'll see in my entire working life. How is that common? Is it the fact that she doesn't use thesis-paper words? So what? I know dishwashers who write critical theory and can't get better jobs. Is this really the metric we're going to use? (Oops, not "metric"; I meant "yardstick.")
Maybe Hollywood is itself partly to blame. Again, they're paid to confirm peoples' desired images, and there is certainly a demand for images contrasting urbane glamor with small-town dorkiness. Maybe we can't blame Bill Whittle for feeling that the dorks are unfairly treated in some movies. What we can do is fucking despair that rather than take a sober look at the reality, people like Whittle retreat into a kitsch in which Mr. Flip-Flop is a paladin and the governor of Alaska is a common person.
Meanwhile, you and I, not in spite of our values but because of them are -- cynical, amoral elites with no values.
Ask the common people of all politics and persuasions aboard Flight 93 whether greatness and courage has deserted America ... it is the small-town virtues of self-reliance, hard work, personal responsibility, and common-sense ingenuity
... none of which can be found anywhere near a big city where people struggle, their own solitary advocates, to get their work produced against enormous odds ...
— and not those of the preening cosmopolitans that gape at them in mixed contempt and bafflement — that have made us the inheritors of the most magnificent, noble, decent and free society ever to appear on this earth. This Western Civilization... this American City... has earned the right to greet each sunrise with a blast of silver trumpets that can bring down mountains.
... on the other hand, it's obvious that Bill Whittle should be writing screenplays because "silver trumpets bringing down mountains" would be a killer scene for the trailer.
Here's a bit of "common sense" for you: everybody who's in the paper is selling something, including Bill Whittle. What he's selling here is fantastic for publishers, because it multiplies the markets for published opinions.
And what he's selling is: more of that stale Culture War bullshit that we've endured for our entire lives. Just another flog of that ugly false dilemma whose proponents would like to separate us from our grandparents, separate city denizens from rural folks, separate the spiritual from the scientific, separate the patriotic from the critical, separate blacks from whites, separate elites from the people we then excoriate them for failing to understand. It's time to decisively reject this stupid old paradigm and people like Bill Whittle who are flogging it in - yes, that's right - the media.